Game 9: X4 Foundations Part 2 - Holy Warrior

We are a warrior, we pilot a warship for the Godrealm of the Paranid.

This may be a short run.

No guided start here - I'm just somewhere in space in a cool-looking cockpit after a short intro screen proclaiming the righteousness of the Godrealm against the heretical Holy Order.

I have faith, I must figure out what is going on and help end this war.

I really dig this cockpit.

I've got a badass looking ship with a badass color scheme.

I'm not yet actually friendly enough with the Godrealm, the faction I purportedly serve, to join their military operations but we'll start by correcting that with some missions for them. After just one mission to destroy criminal traffic, so many criminals show up at a single station that I end up killing at least a dozen, and the Godrealm now wants me to join after just a single mission. I am dubbed a Friend of the Godrealm and am inducted into the war. I rename my vessel the Acolyte, and name my faction Acolytes of the Godrealm.

NOW I am a holy warrior.

The Paranid have great looking conference rooms.

The heretics we're fighting, the Holy Order, are also Paranids, so this is something of a civil war. They must submit, and I will throw the whole of my efforts into doing so until this war is ended. I begin to have my first doubts however when our war coordination headquarters turns out to be... a snail farm.

Perhaps this is simply what God intended. Or Gods? I'm fuzzy on the details of our faith beyond 'Kill the Heretics'.

I found an NPC that gives quests! I'd searched stations for these in my first game before giving up, I missed that there's a little map icon indicating that such an NPC exists on a station. This human claims to be an artist - and all he needs for inspiration is some Majaglit.

Personally I never touch the stuff, but it's legal and available at the traders right here on the station, so one shopping trip later he pays me very well.

This satellite deployment mission has become a difficult geometry problem of how one should efficiently cover a spherical area with smaller spherical areas.

I probably shouldn't have been such a cheapskate and just bought more advanced satellites for this.

I haven't yet taken a mission that involves directly attacking our foes - I'm shoring up our war effort instead - and that pays off when I'm asked to go behind enemy lines and scan a module. There's a whole damn fleet of Holy Order ships hanging around on their side of the border gate!

I'd never be able to scan a module and get out alive if they were actively hostile!

I take a moment to trigger Boso appearing and giving me the station like I did in the first game - the event is in the same place so it's appears to be a standard quest line. It was very handy last time just to have a place to safely store any illegal items I happen to pick up. Speaking of Illegal, part of the Godrealm war effort involves keeping the population pure and clean - one of my missions is to scan ships until I find one carrying Spaceweed so we can monitor the usage of the drug. I presume this means they want me to patrol Godrealm space and look for traders carrying the drug, but after scanning some random ships I realize it could take a long time to find a ship carrying Spaceweed. I have the brilliant idea to find a spaceweed farm and lurk there and wait to see what traders show up and scan them after they leave. I find the farm but nobody shows after a few minutes, and then I get another idea....

It's just for personal use I swear!

I bought one spaceweed and put it on my ship, then exited into my spacesuit and scanned my own ship. The Godrealm saw this and said it was good enough for a mission reward. There's a lot of deployment missions in the war-related missions that I'm able to do, so it occurs to me that my first additional ship should just be something small that can conduct those deployments for me - something cheap and bare bones, and if it dies it dies and the crew go to Godrealm Heaven anyway. I stop by a Wharf and that small mining ship I didn't get to use last time is only slightly more expensive than the cheapest scout so I pick that up - it'll do deployments when I need it to and I can see how well it does mining when it's not in use.

Your employees don't need great equipment when you have faith.

The miner might not be ideal for deployables... it did fine for a couple missions but on this one it laid five out of eight mines outside the target area.

I guess you get what you pay for.

Also, it hasn't actually been mining anything at all despite having an automine command for ice and there clearly being ice present in the sector it's supposed to mine. Ahh.... Turns out I didn't put mining lasers on it... I suppose they were just flying around staring at all the minerals they couldn't mine and praying for them to be transferred into the hold. It's mining a bit now but I still have to manually tell it to go sell the minerals it collects. The only automatic command available to the captain now is a 'local automine' which mines just one sector and then tries to sell the product in that one sector, which means it'll only really work if I can find a sector with good resources and a station to sell it at. I had similar problems with the Asimov in my first game, there are automatic trading commands at low levels but they don't work very well and the 'better' multi-sector ones are unavailable until the captain gains skill ranks. This happens over time or with the use of purchasable 'Seminars', and raising crew skill takes long enough that I think that those seminars may well be worth the high price you have to pay for the bigger ones. Anyway, I got a couple missions to destroy some Xenon ships from two different factions for a half mil credits each, so I'm off to Argon space trying to safely pick off Xenons.

There's a Xenon destroyer in the area which I'm trying to be appropriately wary of.

Some of the war missions I've been getting against the Holy Order ask me to destroy one particular ship, but the Holy Order are massing for war like you wouldn't believe - these single ships are accompanied by about ten of their brethren and I don't think I have a reasonable chance of killing them and getting out alive, so thus far I've been abandoning those missions when I get to them. There was a quite a bit of carnage left over from the Xenon incursion, looks like hulks from multiple capital ships. (edited)

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So the choice facing me now is... focus on passive income or simply use mission income to start recruiting wingmen?

Since I'm a holy warrior, let us prepare for war. Once we have enough money we'll hire some wingmen and try to make a militarily-capable strike force to fight the Holy Order with.

Oooh, that was interesting - after I and the Argon forces shot down enough of them, the Xenon incursion appeared to suffer a morale failure as their remaining ships all retreat back through the gate them came in.

The Terran forces (pink) that were fighting them are shown here pursuing the fleeing Xenon back through their gate.

I'm going to stay here and try to collect all the things that dropped. I've got 2 million, so it's time to get another ship. I realize that if I do end up floating in space again when I go to war my chances of survival increase a whole lot if I get that teleportation tech, so first thing is that I do need a freighter to supply my home station (Named Sacred Geometry since the Godrealm worships the 'three-dimensionality')

The Devout looks like it could please a woman but that is definitely not allowed in my faction.

This ship that looks like it got attacked by an overheated circuit board appeared and said something about being from the 'Federation' and then went on its merry way.

Oh hey, all that Xenon hunting put me in good stead with Argon and they're also in conflict with the Holy Order! I don't see why I can't try to bring both factions to bear against the Heretics so I will definitely seek to develop this further.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend!

I've constructed a solar module on my station - it's a production module that makes energy cells for free, so hopefully traders come and pick them up, or I can use my freighter to sell them when there's enough to bother with taking them somewhere. It's making them very slowly, and station construction is pretty expensive (for me) since it requires obtaining all the resources to build the modules.

On the plus side it just makes Solar Cells from nothing, and doesn't cost money to run.

This game tries to simulate a lot of what's going on, but one thing it doesn't simulate is the process of transferring crew members. This is Station Manager Korahmasomethingorother, and he's piloting my ship right now because I wanted to give him a training seminar but I couldn't communicate with him because I was several sectors away.

Solution: I told him to work on the ship and he immediately appeared - he's already got teleportation figured out.

I remain astounded that everyone loves having a random ship come in and blast their 'criminals' to space dust whenever you want to. Thanks to universal endorsement of such vigilantism, this is one of the most fun mission types in the early game.

Got weapons? Drop on by our interstellar snail farm and kill whoever we'd like you to kill for some cash!

I have researched teleportation again! Ugh, my freighter was accosted by pirates and I told them to escape. They failed to do so and the pirates destroyed them.

She had a full hold of expensive goods, so this is basically a million+ credits lost.

Some of her crew survive in space suits. I'm thankfully able to rescue them but one by one as they get rescued I have to fire them as I have no additional place they can currently be employed.

Surely the pain of losing your unpaid job is mitigated by being saved from suffocating to death in space.

This unconscionable pirate attack happened in Godrealm space, by the three! Why must terrible things happen to good Paranids? There were many more crew on that ship that did not survive the attack. My fellow Paranids died because of my failure, my lack of foresight. I will not repeat this mistake. I will not rely on the callous whims of the X, Y and Z to protect my people. I will commission another freighter - but first, I will obtain another fighting ship so that it may be protected at all times. Using all my cash, the Penitent will be my new vessel when it is constructed (Part of the economy simulation is this station needs sufficient items including hull parts to actually build the ship), the Acolyte will take on escort and other duties.

Now to run missions so that I may once again obtain a freighter.

Some good economic news - producing energy cells at my station has resulted in some sales in what may be my first actual passive income source.

At last! Free money, the dream is realized!

The Argon Holy Order war coordinator welcomes me aboard whilst assuring me he's not racist. Speciesist?

I suspect he thinks I'm one of the 'good' Paranids.

The Penitent is built and ready!

Also a very nice cockpit. I like the Paranid ships.

May the Up and Down forgive me, for I have sinned.

I was performing engine research by racing, a noble goal I swear.

On completion I went to the race organizer for a prize, and he had this gorgeous ship parked there, captivating me with her beauty.

No purple-blooded Paranid would turn their eyes away.

I was merely going to compliment the owner on their taste, I swear by the Back and Forth! But by all the volumes when the sly Scaled one offered to sell her to me, I could not resist....

I have dubbed her the Indulgence

Even so, I'm getting pretty good at earning money from missions - I've got enough to also purchase the Devotee and get a freighter back in my service.

Welcome aboard, please don't ask what happened to my last freighter crew.

My various efforts at shoring up the war effort pay off and I am inducted into the Honor Guard of Xaar - the Priests must have overlooked my transgressions in favor of my honorable (mostly logistical) service thus far, but I feel the need to prove myself in combat. I have seen that the Holy Order has entire fleets at is disposal, and I have but a few small combat ships.

This must change.

How do I get the job where I stand under the fancy lights all day?

Ok, rant time: X4's user interface is a huge pile of dogshit, much to the detriment of the rest of the game. The list of nitpicks you could have about the UI would get very long and tedious, so I'm just going to highlight what I think are the main issues:

To find Personnel Management, navigate to 'Player Information', then....

• They've packed too many functions into too few top-level menus. For example, the 'Player Information' menu has some options you would expect, such as your personal inventory and in-game messages, but it ALSO has important empire information, like your personnel lists and empire-wide transaction reports. Managing your faction absolutely warrants a separate dedicated menu, I would think.

  
  

• The game is still being fully rendered in the background while in these menus (you can see my cockpit view in the screenshot above), and you will be spending a lot of time in these menus (especially the map). It's not like the faded-out view of the cockpit is useful so its bizarre to me that they didn't try to save some framerates on these menus by just turning that off while you're in them.

  
  

• They have tried to do way too much in the map. If player + empire management is a bit much for one tab, they have tried to cram damn near everything else you can do into the map. I long for a tab just dedicated to the business of trading - a very important task in an economic simulator! - that would help me with the essentials of what you want to do in trade, which at its core is just 'buy low, sell high'. To wit, a single page that just lists every trade good, its known highest selling price, and its known lowest purchasing price, and a link to the station locations of each would go a very long way towards making trade easier to manage without changing anything about how the game mechanics work.

  
  

  But no, instead you get this:

Windowception

You get a series of free-floating windows that only show five (randomly selected? I don't even know the default criteria for which goods are displayed) bought and sold goods for an area contextualized to whatever map area you have happened to zoom in on. The windows can bump into and overlap each other, and to see other trade goods you might be interested in you either need to zoom way down to the level of individual stations or you can use the trade filters and manually type in the trade good you want these floating windows to highlight.  So just to browse through the trade goods I'd either need to zoom in and randomly pan around or zoom way out, or I could repeatedly filter via this checkbox list.

Filtering by manually checking or unchecking each of the options here

Heck, just now while getting these screenshots I realized that I haven't been seeing a lot of trade offers at all because I had a minimum volume set on these filters - that's been present for this entire game, probably as a left over setting from my last game. I've been repeatedly searching for Smart Chips and not finding any despite knowing of various stations that produce them, and this leftover filter is responsible.

• The poor UI is magnified by the fact that you need to use it a lot - in this early game I mostly can't 'set it and forget it' with my ships to any good effect, so I'm manually managing trades with my freighter, and I've got my miner mining ore in a really ore-poor system but it's the only one I found which has an ore processor he can actually sell the ore to, and local automine only works within a single sector.
  

How might you manage and organize the fleets of your mighty empire? Is that a top level item? Ha ha, you fool.

You can manage fleets via Map -> Property Owned (Second button down on the left side) -> Fleets (Third horizontal button).

Can you create a new fleet via this fleet management menu? Absolutely not, you uncultured boob. That is, of course, performed by first selecting a ship that will NOT be the leader of the fleet and then right-clicking on the ship that WILL be the leader of the fleet and choosing 'Create Fleet' - ha, got you, there's no option on the menu that says 'Fleet' anywhere. You choose 'Defend Commander' or some other 'Role' AND THEN you can select Alpha, Beta, all kinds of Greek letters!

That's how you make a fleet, you imbecile.

All of this is to say that it's insane that this franchise got to its fourth iteration with the UI in this state, and that more than anything X5 needs to vastly improve on it, because its primarily responsible for the steep learning curve and has undoubtedly discouraged many prospective players. I couldn't honestly recommend the game to someone else without plenty of forewarning about this. Ok, rant over. Back to the game.

I've decided it's time to start taking the fight to the Holy Order, but I can't do it alone, and I'm poor.

Thus, I am recruiting a small squadron. Since we worship the dimensions there will be six to represent all of the Holy Directions - the Up, the Down, the Left, the Right, the Back, and the Forth.

Each ship is a bare-bones fighter with cheap weapons. Alone, it would be suicidal to battle in this - but together with me this squadron will be able to bring over 20 of those weapons into a battle, and even at lower damage individually that's respectable firepower. If this works, the ones who survive and become better pilots will also see their ships upgraded as we can afford to.

Earn your upgrades, my acolytes!

The new freighter, Devotee, was attacked by a pirate.. but things went very differently than last time. The freighter's escort, Acolyte, did its job and attacked the pirate. I happened to be nearby so very shortly after that we arrived as reinforcements.

The pirate realized he stood no chance, and he abandoned his damaged ship and launched an escape pod.

This pirate bit off more than they could chew.

The damaged fighter was left adrift in space, and I was able to tell one of my ships to claim it. It launched a boarding pod with a spare crew member.

They probably stole this ship in the first place. Mine now!

And now I have added a captured ship to my growing fleet. It's more of a scout than anything else but it's very cool that I can capture ships this way.

Not one I would have purchased but you can't beat free.

Now that I know that ships can sometimes be abandoned like this, I keep my eye out and quickly spot another abandoned ship back near where I've been fighting the Xenon - not sure when that happened but nobody has claimed it yet.

I salvage and restore this crippled Xenon Heavy Fighter.

I might fly it myself given that it has four weapon slots, but some of its tech (like its shields) aren't compatible with our tech so I'm not sure how much better I can make this.

I would love to be able to fully arm this thing.

Still a very cool addition to my ships. There's some nice touches to make the Xenon ship feel different, I actually can't find a way into it until I figure out there's a drop-down elevator to get in rather than the ladder every other ship I've seen uses. Getting into and out of the Captain's Chair produces an insane sound straight out of 80's sci-fi. Sadly only one of the four weapon slots are filled and I can't mount non-Xenon weapons on her, so I think she sits in space dock or is used for minor tasks unless and until I can access Xenon tech somehow. I considered selling her but strangely nobody is interested in paying much for captured Xenon tech. My streak of luck with enemy pilots abandoning ships continues when I take a mission to get a guy's wedding ring back and my target both gives up the ring and bails from his ship!

This Minotaur Raider is a big corvette!

Fully repairing and equipping her is brutal on the budget however and I really want to assemble my fighter squadron, so I sell her. I like the Paranid ship aesthetic since they have a better grasp of Dimensional Divinity. There's an order to sell a ship but it doesn't tell you how much money you'll get.  Well, here goes. Oh wait, it does tell you in a dialog box after selecting the option. 1.1 million for her, that'll go a long way. That's enough to finally get this squadron off the ground!

Behold, the Orthogonals!

Myself as Center, with six faithful Paranid each representing one of the cardinals directions. Together, it is time to take the fight to the Holy Order, and begin our contribution to the righteous efforts of the Godrealm in conquering the heretics.

May the true Pontifex be ascendant!

I decide to take the Orthogonals through their paces via having them attack some laser towers, so I start assembling the ships into position just off the station. Suddenly as I'm messing around with ship formations I get a missile warning? What?

Brief glimpses of a bounty hunter, missiles, guns. One of the other Orthogonals is shot down, and so am I - the others scatter in confusion at the surprise attack.

I realize I can teleport out of the situation seconds too late.

The unknown attackers blast my suit before I can reach safety.

I'll never know who they were, the fate of the pilots I just recruited, or the outcome of the Holy War - my story is over.

Guess I pissed off the wrong entity.